For many, many years, I was an Oscar nut. I watched them every year with the reverence of a Catholic at Sunday Mass in St. Peter's Square. I am a total Oscar stat nerd as well. Ben Hur was nominated for 12 Oscars and won 11. The only one it didn't win? Best Adapted Screenplay. I know that off the top of my head. Don't be impressed; it's called trivia for a reason. Anyway, I digress. Since my invitation to join the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences got lost in the mail again this year, I will have to settle for voting in the SAG Awards this year. I get such a geeky thrill of watching the films, filling out my little ballot and either mailing it off or doing it online. At any rate, I've seen a whole bunch of the SAG nominated films lately and here are my thoughts on them (with the exception of Milk, 'cause I've already raved about it):
The Visitor is a nice quiet film about a lonely man (Richard Jenkins) who happens upon an immigrant couple squatting on his Manhattan apartment. It takes its time with the characters, letting all the relationships develop organically. And Richard Jenkins' performance is wonderful in its detail. How he holds his shoulders, how he manuevers through the city, how he walks... it's an excellent performance. Totally worth renting.
Imagine a very well-dressed string quartet playing the same measure of 6 notes over and over again for 2 hours and forty-five minutes, and that's what it's like sitting through The Curious Case of Benjamin Button. It's a very, very pretty movie. Some of the images are breath-taking and there are a lot of great art direction going on. But it's also pretty shallow. None of the characters have much depth to them; each of them is done is such broad strokes that you don't really learn much new about them as they age. And Pitt's performance is pretty... well, somnambulant. And while the makeup and the FX are impressive, they don't tell the story on their own. And also, using such a recent national emotional wound like Hurricane Katrina as a framing device in a movie about Brad Pitt getting younger is not only tone deaf; it's just vile. All that said, there are a few acting bright spots, including Cate Blanchett, Jason Flemyng as Benjamin's bio dad and Tilda Swinton as Ben's mistress. But Jared Harris as the "colorful" tugboat captain is just irritating.
Tropic Thunder was a lot funnier than I thought it was going to be. A very sharp satire that gets a bit tiresome in the last 1/3, the movie is buoyed by Robert Downey Jr's performance. He is just damn funny in the ultra-meta role playing an actor who went under plastic surgery to play another character. Keep that in mind when he starts speaking Mandarin at the climax of the film and your head might explode. And much hay as been made about Tom Cruise. Downey Jr. is under a ton of makeup and is playing 2 people at once. Tom Cruise is under a ton of make up and plays... Tom Cruise. Yeah, don't think so. (I did not see the dancing coming, I'll give you that)
If you want an acting lesson, see Doubt. The acting the film is just untouchable (the best 2008 ensemble next to Milk, in my humble opinion). From Meryl Street to Phillip Seymour Hoffman to Amy Adams (slowly becoming one of my favorite actors, period) and Viola Davis, everyone is pitch perfect. It helps when you are working with such great source material from writer-director John Patrick Shanley. The problem with the movie is that, for some reason, Shanley is not trusting his story and starts to overdirect. What's up with the canted-60's Batman Villian angles, dude? You won a Tony and the Pulitzer for your play, Mr. Shanley. You don't need to hit us over the head with the direction, man. We get what's going on, we don't need it underlined. See the movie anyway and just focus on the performances.
Rachel Getting Married is the only movie in my entire life that I walked out on in the theater. Now, I get bad motion sickness for shaky camerawork. Blair Witch Project made me pretty nauseous. When I saw Monsoon Wedding, my head was in the chair next to me 'cause I thought I was going to vomit. Cloverfield made me a bit woozy and I watched that at home. The unifying theme in these three films? I felt compelled to watch it all the way through because I wanted to know what was going on with the characters and their environment. Not so with Rachel Getting Married. It's the story of Kym (Anne Hathaway), a former fashion model getting out a rehab for the second time to go to her sister Rachel's wedding. And Kym is an asshole. Self-absorbed and horribly self-centered, Kym goes back to her father's house to see it in chaos due to wedding prep. Now, if this was set up like Sixteen Candles where there's the likable underdog in a sea of freaks ("They fucking forgot my birthday!"), then this movie would have worked. But, Kym is no Samantha Baker and instead of Long Duc Dong, we have Fab 5 Freddy. No, seriously. Kym's family is the type of wealthy Connecticut liberals where they make repeated (and horribly stilted) remarks about bringing the troops home and the bridesmaids wear saris, even though nobody in the family is from India. Before the rehearsal dinner, the family gathers for a small music concert, where one of the guests does a heavy metal version of "Here Comes The Bride". Then someone else gets up and sings. And then someone else gets up and plays an instrument... and someone else, and someone else. By person #6, I thought I was going to lose my mind. What the hell is going on here? They then went to the rehearsal dinner where the (former) maid of honor did a toast, followed by the best man... followed by some other characters we had never met... and by the time Kym stood up to do a toast, she was number SEVEN. And at that point, I had had enough. I hated every single person in this film. I hated the really shitty handheld camera work; it added nothing. I hated the script. I hated what was happening, and I hated being subjected to it. So, I got up and walked out. Yikes. I'd rather sit through Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull again before Rachel Getting Married, I hated it so much.
Frozen River is hands down the big surprise for me of 2008. I had no idea this movie was going to be this good. It's the story of a middle-aged woman Ray (in a kick-ass performance by Melissa Leo) living in New York by the Canada border with her 2 kids working as a clerk in a dollar store, trying to save money to buy a larger trailer to live in, and as the movie starts, her husband has run off with all their money. She ends up falling into the orbit of a woman who smuggles illegal immigrants and... well, I won't spoil anything. The whole movie just works, and takes turns that you don't expect but make total sense. It moves well, shot well, and the acting is just top-notch. Treat yourself.
Revolutionary Road has portions that work beautifully and sections that are just rather meh, which pretty much sums up my take on Leonardo DiCaprio. I've always felt he's a scattershot actor. Some moments he'll be brilliant and others he'll just phone it in, sometimes in the same scene. And he does that a lot in this film. But then there's Kate Winslet, as the frustrated housewife, and she is absolutely brilliant. Brilliant. You feel everything she's feeling, you see the frustration on her face, she is just amazing. The relationship between her & 'Nardo is quite good. Many times you get what's going on between them through the subtext in a very visceral way, which is impressive. But too frequently, you get other scenes that just sit there. Or,with the Michael Shannon character, really really REALLY lazing writing. Saying the storytelling is uneven in the film is an understatement. Still, it's a good movie and totally worth seeing.
Imagine that a long time ago when you were around 13 years old, you were invited to a family friend's house for dinner. And the food he made was amazing. It left such an impression that when the invite arrived next year, you were tripping over yourself to go to his house to eat. And the meal was pretty much the same with maybe 2 different ingredients and new garnishes. And this continues for decades. It's the same meal, the same food, and after a while, you realize his knife skills in prepping the vegetables aren't what they used to be, and his palate has started to get... blander. So, for a few years, you skip the invite to dinner. But then, this year, the invite comes in the mail, touting that he's doing Spanish food this time around. You think, oh, that's great, something different. So you go to his house and you start to dig in and you realize that adding saffron to Campbell's Cream of Mushroom soup casserole doesn't make a dish Spanish. Sure, there's some nice tapas as some side dishes and there's a spicy payaya as a SIDE DISH instead of the entree. You eat the meal, and while parts of it are tasty, the rest is the same old stuff he's done for decades, just reheated and dressed up with some new flatware and hip dishes. And you let out a big sigh. That was my experience watching Vicky Cristina Barcelona.
Oh, and I loved The Dark Knight. Period. More later.
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